Humans first [Archives:2002/33/Viewpoint]

Almost every foreigner working in the field of development I met during the last 10 years believes that the top priority the Yemeni government should consider is human resource development.
One of those individuals told me, You can have money, wealth, and resources, but without humans to use them efficiently, then you have absolutely nothing.
In other words, Yemens priority should be focused on humans. We should educate, train, and rehabilitate humans before we move on to step two.
The West realized this fact a very long time ago, and started focusing on humans before anything else. The persons with a sign of extra intelligence were taken good care of. Inventors, scientists, educators, trainers, and others with a sense of human contribution were always given special attention.
What is happening here in Yemen in particular is the opposite. The ones with good skills are neglected and ignored. Professors and teachers are treated less respectfully then soldiers and tribesmen. This started a long brain drain process that caused slower development and in some cases deterioration.
We have forgotten that our religion Islam promotes human development in all fields. It encourages education, knowledge, science, skill development, innovation, and other contributions to humanity.
What our governments have done is import foreign expertise, ideas, inventions, and products while overlooking the possibility of developing our own. We have fallen prey to a foolish misconception that says, as long as we have what we want, we need not to worry about where it comes from. This is indirect suicide. We as Arab nation are indeed dying slowly because we are giving away the lively and creative and keeping the dull and unproductive. We have given up hope in our ability to produce and develop perhaps because we have a chronic presumption that we are less intelligent than the West.
But wait a minute. Dont we know that many of the current scientific researches and studies in the USA are done by Arabs and Muslims? Dont we realize that the USA was able to reach this level of development by not only sufficing itself in depending only on its own talents but extended that by seeking the encouragement and employment of foreign brains and ideas ?
Globalization is working on attracting the best brains to the developed world while leaving the uneducated and unproductive to the developing world. We need to understand the game that is being played and we need to play it right.
We are missing the most important point of all. This point is humans. Humans create civilizations, progress, prosperity and development, and unless we take care of those humans, we will continue to fall deeper and deeper into the trashcan of civilizations.

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